The following is an outtake from an article Cindi Katz and I have been writing on the relationship between U.S. children and young people and their technological environments in the post-9/11 security state. Once/if the final article is published, I’ll post a link to it here. In the meantime, consider this a “teaser.”

These shifts, and the struggles over them, remind us of Seymour Papert’s (1993, p5) caution that, “there is a world of difference between what computers can do and what society will choose to do with them.” In the post-9/11 security state, we can look to that other contemporary site of homeland (in)security, New Orleans, for an example of how state and corporate security concerns shape the difference between what a particular technology can do and the purposes to which it is put. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city’s communicative infrastructure was badly damaged except for a wireless mesh-network, similar to one the FOSS XO can generate.  The network covered the downtown business district and the French Quarter. This network, originally implemented to support surveillance cameras in the area, was “hacked” by emergency personnel in the wake of the hurricane and later converted by the city into a free public Wi-Fi service. Although Louisiana state laws ban the free distribution of broadband services with municipal monies, New Orleans was able to circumvent this ban because of its declared state of emergency. Now that the state of emergency has been lifted, BellSouth has challenged the legality of the public Wi-Fi. While the use of publicly funded Wi-Fi is sanctioned for state surveillance, free public access Wi-Fi is seen as a threat to corporate profit and thus curbed.  Clearly choices are being made—choices that go against the democratic possibilities that Papert and his colleagues envisioned when the Internet and personal computing were in their infancy.

NOTE This “outtake” and its relation to the larger paper, from which it was eventually cut, were inspired by two earlier posts: Connectile Dysfunction (CD) and mesh-networking.